


Most Fervently

by halotolerant



Category: The Lost Prince - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: Consensual, Destiny, Devotion, First Kiss, Loyalty, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Pastiche, Requited Love, Sex Education, Soul Bond, Soulmates, The Loristans are special snowflakes, Tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:34:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“You’d a horsefly on you,” Rat explained. “Oh drat, it’s moved to... stay still, close your eyes,” and the touch came again, over his cheek, a swift pressure of cool skin. </i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>And with the touch Marco felt as if the contentment, the heavy peacefulness, having been a calm and solid stillness within him, now rose up in a sudden wave, a gust, a gush of pleasure, sweeping over and around him, no longer warm but hot, taking his breath away.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Most Fervently

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/gifts).



> **Additional Warnings** : Within the fic mpreg (of a kind) is mentioned as a possibility, but only in the way that the 'birds and bees' chat will always cover 'oh by the way, contraception'. Honestly I just found my headcanon for this fandom included it, and it seemed like a logical reason (ahem) for the rest of the plot trope... If anyone is worried by the tags, let me reassure that there is no dubcon in this fic. 
> 
> **Notes** : I've tried to imitate the Frances Hodgson Burnett narrative style/pompous all knowing Edwardian novel narrator voice. In keeping with the canon, this fic does not explore any issues around why hereditary royalty might not always be the absolute best way to run a country.

To explain how unexpectedly things happened, one might wish to begin with a phrase such as ‘it was a day exactly like any other’, but sadly for literary convention, it was not. 

This was not only because of the date and therefore the subsequent celebration which Marco knew was coming that evening, but because the day itself was unusually idyllic even for Samavia; warm sunshine and blue sky, with the gentlest of breezes offering a perfect degree of relief if ever the warmth became more stifling than soothing.

And yet it did not seem such a special day as all that. As Marco lay on the grassy bank at the side of a still-green wheat field and watched a bumblebee make a steady, spiral path on the convolvulus growing on a nearby oak tree, he did not imagine that it was a day – in this part at least - that he would particularly remember. 

Memories of such days, in any case, return in speckling, spangling light and blue-tinged blinking, in echoes of blood under the skin, in thoughts of dreams and drowsiness, and the saturation and satiation occasioned by summer. They can be recalled but never recaptured and part of their magic is that remembrance never at the time seems necessary, because surely they can never end?

Marco felt tranquil and at his ease as, for the sixth or seventh time, he reached for his flask of water and tipped it back against his lips. He and Rat – who, as usual, had spent the day at his side - had eaten lunch about half an hour ago – packets of sandwiches and apples from the palace kitchen – and had intended to remount their horses more swiftly, the faster to get back and start preparing for the evening’s occasion, but there was a delicious transfixing quality in sunshine, and still they lay here. 

Rat was at that moment reading a book, lying on his back and holding it up directly over his face, thus shielding his eyes from the sun. From time to time he grunted, as readers will when a plot takes a turn they are not sure if they approve of. 

Marco closed his eyes and listened to the soft sounds of the countryside; to their horses, grazing and swishing their tails; to the birds in the trees; to Rat’s gentle breathing; to the sounds of peace, the sounds of his Samavia. With a satisfying writhe, he stretched his limbs. He had grown a great deal in the years since returning to his country, and if some of this was merely what all boys do between the ages of twelve and seventeen, some of it was perhaps more, for the oldest legends of Samavia talk often of men as tall and broad and strong as Marco had become, of ancient stock unlike the common run of man.

“Cathy is an utter fool,” Marco heard Rat declare with some feeling, and, opening his eyes, saw his friend sitting up and wiping a hand over his brow, pushing a marker into _Wuthering Heights_ and then reaching for his own water flask. Rat took a long draught, sighed, splashed a little onto his face – it ran down his neck in sparkling droplets, and wetted the hair at the nape of his neck, Marco observed - and sighed in apparent frustration.

Marco laughed. “I did tell you it didn’t all go well for them,” he pointed out. 

Rat ignored this and pulled his watch from his pocket, raising his eyebrows as he opened the lid, where, had he cared to look up from the dial, he would have seen engraved his initials and the phrase _The lamp is lighted_ , for the watch had been his present from Marco on Rat’s sixteenth birthday, two years earlier. 

“We ought to head back,” Rat said, frowning. “We’ll need to be ready well before the first guests arrive.”

Marco tugged up a little of the grass under his fingers. It was lush and green from the rains which had fallen in the past spring. So much of Europe, he knew, was still criss-crossed with the scars of war, just as not so long ago this very field had been under the ravages of the Samavian Civil War which had preceded his father’s return. And yet here once more the grass grew as if had done so undisturbed for centuries, and so elsewhere too there could be the same healing. 

Perhaps he was simply in the mood to see beauty today – he felt so calm, so intoxicated with sunshine, heavy limbed and content. 

“Five years since the Restoration,” he said. “And now we celebrate what once we scarcely believed could happen. God be thanked.” And he lay back again and looked one more time, squinting, into the blue. 

He was not dreading the feast. That was not it at all. But of all the functions that came with the state of being the heir to the throne, formal social occasions were perhaps his least favourite. He did not like to dress in fine clothes when other garments did just as well (and a man is not, as his father had often taught him, to be measured on his attire), he did not enjoy eating to excess and whilst some people were lovely to be in company with, others were not, but one still had to find ways to be polite to them. 

At twelve, the idea of a Prince is a fine thing, especially if one thinks it will be someone else being one. By seventeen, life has a tendency to have become more complex, and wants and needs will grow and diversify, whether willed or not. 

“Watch out!” said Rat, suddenly, sharply, and Marco froze instantly and then felt a swift firm brush against his arm. 

“You’d a horsefly on you,” Rat explained. “Oh drat, it’s moved to... stay still, close your eyes,” and the touch came again, over his cheek, a swift pressure of cool skin. 

And with the touch Marco felt as if the contentment, the heavy peacefulness, having been a calm and solid stillness within him, now rose up in a sudden wave, a gust, a gush of pleasure, sweeping over and around him, no longer warm but hot, taking his breath away.

“Are you alright?” Rat was asking, and Marco sat up, aware that he was breathing fast, almost panting, and that his face felt flushed and red. “Did the thing bite you after all?”

“No, I am quite well, I...” Marco reached for his water again, but picking it up realised from the lightness of the flask that he had drained it. 

“Here,” said Rat, immediately passing over his own, and Marco opened it gratefully, feeling the water cool and pleasant across his lips, and yet... 

He could not _possibly_ be able to taste that Rat had used the flask. No one could do such a thing. And he had no objection at all in principle to sharing that might otherwise have accounted for his feeling odd about it. Had, perhaps, Rat eaten something that would bring this tingling sensation to Marco’s mouth? But it would only embarrass him to ask. 

So Marco rubbed his hand over his lips and took a deep breath and schooled the confusion from his face. 

“Marco?” Rat was saying, still sounding far from reassured, and he raised his hand to Marco’s brow, testing the temperature of his forehead with the back of his hand. 

Marco was aware of leaning into the touch, of the way Rat’s cool hand soothed him, or at least made something feel easier, better, inside – it was not soothing, not this repeated rush of sensation. Aching almost, somewhere within him, but he did not feel ill, simply... Rat’s other hand was on his face now too, cradling it, and Marco made a noise he did not quite control, because this too was better and yet not exactly relief. 

“Marco? What is it?” 

Marco opened his eyes – he had not been aware of closing them – and saw Rat’s worried frown and the way he was chewing his lip. He looked flushed, and his hair was still wet and his hands, at Marco’s cheeks, had become warm too. 

“You are right, we ought to heading back,” Marco said, rolling away and then leaping to his own feet. He did not tell lies, and was not about to say he was well and untroubled, but there was no vocabulary he knew to communicate what had happened, even if he knew what indeed it was. 

He was not in the habit of offering Rat any assistance with his own rising from the ground – Rat did not like it and did not really need it, providing he had his crutches and that there was no absolute and critical rush in the matter. Today though, it was with unhappy consciousness that Marco moved away to check the girth on his horse’s saddle rather than risk Rat taking his hand; he could not fathom what had happened, but it was clear enough that touching Rat had something to do with it. 

Once they were both mounted and riding off again along the pleasant bridle path towards the larger road that would take them back to the Summer Palace, Marco felt more himself. He had probably had too much sun, he reasoned – merely a little moment of feverishness; it had passed, it would not trouble him again. 

Rat was initially continuing to regard him with concern, but as the journey passed he too seemed to forget it, and they were both laughing and joking quite naturally by the time they arrived at the palace.

\- - -

Marco thought that it felt very warm in his bedroom, the heat of the day evidently not relieved by the onset of evening. Rather, it seemed to be getting more close and heavy, a thick quality to the air that made his skin flush and prickle. 

His own clothes for the celebration – the smart, black uniform of the Guards of whom he was titular head – had not appealed much to him, but when the knock had come on his door and Rat entered, Marco had realised things could be worse.

Now Rat turned slowly about on the spot, allowing a view of his entire outfit. “You can say it, you know,” he said, half-smiling, half-grimacing. “I look an absolute fright, don’t I?”

Marco, sitting back in one of the several upholstered chairs that littered his bedroom (it is a principle of monarchy, it seems, to have more furniture than one can reasonably use, ideally so ornamental as not to be of use at all), grinned and put a hand to his mouth, trying to cover a chuckle. 

“You may laugh,” Rat told him, raising an eyebrow, mock-offended. “You’d look awful in powder blue. Anyone would. Except, actually, probably, you wouldn’t. No, you’d make it look dignified and quite tasteful somehow. And you wouldn’t get any sauce on all these lace cuff frills, though how I’m to manage I’ve no idea.”

Marco bit his finger and then gave up and laughed, sinking down across his chair until he threatened to slide onto the floor as his body shook with mirth. 

Once, not so many years earlier, Marco might not have been able to imagine laughing at something as serious as a uniform of state. But the truth of uniforms of state, as he had learnt within weeks of his elevation to the monarchy, was that there were a great many of them, few designed for comfort or practicality, and even fewer with anything that might be called taste, unless one’s heart tended naturally to a very great deal of brocade. 

He still found it odd how important some people seemed to find matters of dress. To Marco, Rat was Rat, and a powder blue dragoon jacket with a hundred and ten hook-button closures and a purple silk sash could neither diminish nor improve him. But he had been astonished more than once at how much difference there might be in the manner of others towards Rat, depending on whether they first encountered him whilst formally attired or – as had sometimes happened – coming in from riding with Marco in shirtsleeves or something yet scruffier. 

Their looks, then, said more than words and cut more deeply, in Marco’s heart at least, even if Rat claimed not to care.

To other people, now, whatever their opinion on the matter, Rat was ‘Sir Jeremy’ and indeed Marco became ‘Prince Ivor’. These were their real names for any properly objective vision of reality, but sometimes Marco could find he felt more recognised than at any other moment when Rat called him the same name he always had. 

Marco had pondered, a little, over Rat’s name, because whilst he knew that words are symbols, and sounds can signify different things at different times to different people - _Haus_ may mean the same as house, but _Kommode_ does not mean commode, and ‘Rat’, to Marco, was that name which signified a dear companion and loyal friend, and if it meant other things elsewhere, that was not his concern – he worried that Rat might feel it a slight or a degradation. 

“You may call me whatever you wish,” Rat had said, earnestly, in answer. “And if you will insist that I am to keep calling you Marco rather than your proper title, as I should, then I must be Rat, and then it will be fair.”

This, Marco did not entirely follow, but it seemed to settle the matter. 

Their tutor, for the all the years they had him, had called them by their respective titles in a stubbornly proper manner, which was perhaps only correct since court etiquette was amongst the subjects in which he instructed them. Marco’s father had initially expressed doubts about whether he ought to send them both back to one of the better public schools in Britain, or an academy in Switzerland, which was the education most young royalty of the world might expect to have. “But you ought to have lived, at last, in your own country,” he explained to Marco one evening, having put the case to him from both sides in a clear and rational manner, as was to be his increasing habit, that Marco might understand his decisions. “And, I confess, I am influenced by how little I wish to be parted from you.”

It had already been many years, then, since Marco had been in the habit of running to his father’s side and seeking to be picked up and carried, but at that moment he had found he could not restrain the impulse to go and hug him very tightly, as if with the strength of his muscles he could convey the strength of his feeling. 

There had still been the question over Rat – did he even, Marco’s father had pointed out, wish to make his home so permanently in a new country, where he did not even speak the language? 

“He will wish to stay!” Marco had asserted, utterly certain and yet, as he spoke, aware that he was uncertain. He had frowned, pondering this fact. “He wishes to be always with me. With us.”

Marco’s father had smiled and placed a hand on Marco’s shoulder. “You may think so, and indeed so do I, but that does not mean that we should not ask him.”

Rat’s answer had been quite as determined and unqualified as Marco might have hoped, and so the tutor it had been, for both of them and also for some sons of the other major nobles of the court, that they might have a chance to make more friends their own age. Which they did, quite happily, both of them having always been gregarious. Their sticking together so much and so long was not at all for the lack of other people, as Marco had cause to ponder when one of their less pleasant classmates – a minor Baron of Zvatliva – had asked of Marco, curling his lip “Of all the boys in all the world, why on earth do you associate with _him_?”

Marco had been so surprised that it had taken a moment for his anger to rise in response. Of course he was friends with Rat – why would he ever not be?

Now, as he laughed and fell about, Marco did not know why his thoughts had found these recollections on this particular day. Perhaps it could be surmised that the human subconscious works with more rapidity even than the mind of a singularly intelligent boy; we are often a mystery to ourselves, and a young person between the years of sixteen and twenty may be supposed to find more confusion in their reflections than most. 

Some actions, by comparison, are instinctive. Seeing the state in which Marco had found himself on the chair, Rat rolled his eyes and made his way across the floor towards him, and, balancing his crutch carefully under his arm, held out his hand.

“Are you injured, My Lord?” Rat asked, grinning. “May I assist you?”

Marco held out his own hand easily enough in response, too late remembering the consequences of their shared touch earlier in the day.

But that had been all because of the sunshine, surely?

Marco was not the only one to have grown, in their five years on Samavian soil, and whilst Marco remained the taller (and had heard every compliment to his figure that might be framed, elegantly and otherwise), Rat had what Marco considered a more real, practical strength, certainly in his arms – he could beat any of man of the guards, arm-wrestling, and often did. 

Now, therefore, Rat pulled Marco upwards and forwards with ease, his grip warm, dry and sure, and Marco took a moment to marvel anew at the mess of marks and scars on the back of Rat’s strong, tanned hands, the symbols of another life and another time, relics of a body propelled on a cart because crutches could not be afforded. 

Without quite meaning to, Marco found himself searching his sensations for the echoes of the earlier feeling, and was surprised to realise he was almost disappointed they did not come. 

And yet, what was that? Perhaps the edge of warmth? Or simply the ending edges of the joy of laughter?

“Something _is_ troubling you,” Rat said, releasing his hand and sitting on the bed, leaning the crutch to one side and then folding his arms. “You might tell me, you know.”

Marco blinked and shook his head. 

“It is only this anniversary,” he said, at length. “Five years since the return of the Fedorovitches. I keep thinking of all we have done in five years and how quickly it has gone, and how once it seemed it would never happen.” This perhaps did not in strict truth reflect his recent thoughts but over the last weeks such themes had indeed much occupied him. 

And then, sitting forwards, because there was such feeling, like a cloud, in his chest, not heavy but thick, overwhelming and he wanted to share it: “I think of when I met you and how little I realised what would happen. I might have walked another way that day so easily, taken another road and I would never...”

He stopped. He did not like even to think of it. 

Rat was moving, as if he felt the intensity of the emotions Marco could not express, his face earnestly studying Marco’s. He grabbed Marco’s hand once more, half-using it to help himself sink to the floor where he knelt, gazing up, imploring, and Marco felt once more a wave of sensation, stronger than that which had gone before. 

“I would have found you!” Rat was saying, his voice urgent. “I cannot believe I would not. I cannot believe I would still live had I not... When my father died, if I had not found you.... I _would_ have found you,” he repeated, determined, frowning now, which Marco knew to be his way, when he fought to control himself. “We are meant,” he concluded, firm and more than a little fierce.

Marco held tight to his hand. The sensation was rising, the heat building, the sense of urgency, or thirst or... he had no words, five languages and he had no words for that feeling, only knew that it made him feel both wonderful and terrible, and a little scared. 

He looked into Rat’s eyes, and met a hard stare in return. 

“And I know something is troubling you, Marco,” Rat told him. “And I wish you would tell me. Or someone. If I cannot help you, then at least I might find you someone who can.”

Marco licked his lips. He could not talk about the Feeling, it was too peculiar. But there had been something else on his mind and perhaps if he were to talk about it...

“It is only,” he began, slowly. “I have been thinking of how important...”

There came a knock at the door, insistent and sharp. 

“Your highness? It is ten past the hour.”

Marco sat up, startled, glancing at the gilded clock on his bedside table. He had never in life been late for a formal appointment and clearly far more time had passed than he had realised since first he had taken Rat’s hand. 

He smiled at Rat apologetically and he moved to adjust his own clothes to their final precise perfection, and Rat answered with a smile of his own which was soft and did not seem at all put out. 

They could talk later, there was plenty of time. Time and world enough, as the poets might have it. Marco was as sure of this as he was of anything. 

Together, they went down to the party.

\- - -

Samavia in the reign of the new King Ivor was not the kind of place where glittering balls in royal palaces made the juxtapositions to grime and poverty in the surrounding streets so beloved by the more satirical cartoonists. The Fedorovitches saved money where they could, paid more attention to governance than to grandeur and saw that it was in the greater national interest that everyone be comfortable, rather than that some be Croesus. 

For this, the fifth anniversary of their restoration, however, something special was fairly demanded, by the public as much as anyone, and in the right hands a relatively small expenditure can produce a very great effect. In any case the economy, long stricken by internal strife, had benefited from the country’s neutrality during the long Great War and so now they were growing rich on exports to places where once recently they had been in debt, and their fields were ahead of much of the continent in being put again to their proper use. 

In short, the scene which greeted guests arriving for the feast that evening would not have shamed even the mightier royal houses of Europe, and Marco did his all to make his own best impression alongside it. 

Much of the early part of the evening he spent standing at his father’s side whilst his father sat enthroned on the dais, receiving the introductions of guest after guest. His father, in his own ceremonial dress, looked in Marco’s eyes every bit as a king should, strong and noble and with an expression always of interest and concentration, even after a full hour of nothing but the drone of ‘Lord and Lady Such and Such’ and ‘The Countess of Somewhere’. 

It was only once that, in a pause as a woman collected an errant shoe, his father turned to speak to him. And this left Marco somewhat confused because his father looked up, studied him and then seemed to take a deep breath almost as if he was seeking some kind of scent upon the air.

“Father?” Marco asked, unable to keep the concern from his voice.

“Do you feel well?” his father asked him, quite seriously. “You may leave and rest a while if this is more than you can manage.”

“No indeed father, I must be here at your side.”

“But you do not feel quite composed?”

Marco bit his lip. It was scarcely even a question, and Marco had been taught never to lie. But he did not want to disappoint his father, even against his will. 

His father smiled and inclined his head. “We must speak, later,” he said in a low voice. “You are doing very well. Do not worry.”

Marco did not fully understand, but by then the Princess of Wherever it Was had resolved her momentary disarray and was approaching to curtsey to them.

Sitting at his place at the great dinner table at last, some hours later, Marco ran his fingers over the silver forks at the left of his place setting and felt once again, as he had all evening, the sense of disjointed amazement, and an uncomfortable awareness of heat that still prickled through him. 

Looking up and along the table – more easily said than done, as many decorations sat in the centre, gilded candelabra and wax fruit and ice swans and any amount of other inedible pointlessness – he caught sight of Rat a few places to the right and opposite himself, and this gave him a greater sense of calm. 

It always helped, having Rat nearby during social occasions. As Marco had grown older and his duties for conversation and dancing had extended into the night, he sometimes struggled not to tire, and instead to be as warm and welcoming and eager for the good of Samavia as he ought to be.

At such times he would find Rat in the crowd – he always seemed to be in view, just as Marco needed him – and to look at him was sustaining as to open a window to fresh mountain air. When Marco found his obligatory companion of the evening absurd, Rat would seem to know, and to share the laugh, and yet relieve Marco of the need to stifle it. When Marco’s companions were dull, Rat’s gaze gave Marco a sense of purpose. And when they were cruel, or petty, or hateful, Rat reminded Marco that sometimes good and noble people need things for which unpleasant people must be propitiated or petitioned. 

Marco had begun to find that he could tell, in his turn, when Rat began to feel the pain of his deformity, even when none else could, and would find a reason to send him on an errand genuine but perhaps not as urgent as all that, to enable his friend to stretch and rest a short while alone until the worst of the spasm was past. 

Rat, for the present, was looking untroubled, and, catching Marco’s eye, smiled back at him, again a soft smile such as earlier, which Marco had not seen from him before. The Feeling was coming again; rising, unsettling, and Marco looked down and away, and said something simple and obvious to his dinner companion on the other side.

The dinner was served in all its several courses, and the evening wore on. The woman with whom Marco’s conversation had begun was in fact one of the many exiled Russian princesses who had recently come to visit the court as they sought lodging with more fortunate relations, and he knew her well enough to speak of things he had a genuine interest in. Princess Josephine was witty and charming and knew a large number of jokes acquired at an English boarding school, which she often reeled off one after the other as those around her descended into greater and greater mirth. 

Tonight, though, she was speaking more seriously and Marco tried his best to follow the thread of her thoughts despite his sense of distraction. He felt a strange central tightness in his chest and belly. It was as though he were waiting for something, but what on earth could it be? The talking, the eating, all this had happened. He had no thirst for dancing. There was nothing more to wait for tonight. 

The day, as previously mentioned, had not seemed to be unusual, nor yet did Marco know it to be. Times of moment in our lives rarely herald themselves, and events already underway may remain a long time undetected, or, if detected, not comprehended for what they are. 

Marco knew merely that he was feeling indisposed, and that Rat was sitting nearby, and that both facts occupied pre-eminence in his mind, perhaps in and of themselves preventing him from drawing any form of conclusion. 

“I am supposed to be getting myself engaged to the Baron Alec,” Princess Josephine was saying. Marco was fairly sure princesses were not supposed to discuss such things, but Josephine – who had shingled hair and smoked thin cigarillos from a tortoiseshell holder in the garden when her chaperone was not present – had never seemed overly concerned with etiquette. 

“Do you think that is a good plan?” she was asking him. “Don’t you think he’s rather old for me?” She put her hand on his arm, her fingers just brushing the skin where his hand emerged from his sleeve. Marco waited, fearfully, to see if the Feeling would return, but there was nothing, just the scent of her perfume. 

“Do you love him?” Marco asked, unsure where her questions tended. 

She laughed, a little, though there was something sad in her eyes rather than the usual bright sparkle. “Can you suppose I would?” she asked, and again whilst her voice teased there was another tone underneath. “You have met the Baron Alec, would _you_ want to wake up next to him forevermore?”

She was only teasing, only being outrageous as was her wont, but Marco could not prevent the flush that rose to his cheeks. Baron Alec was not a very agreeable person – though more dull than unkind - but he was handsome in a rough way, and when Marco had so recently completed _Wuthering Heights_ himself, Alec’s features had not been so far removed from how he had envisioned Heathcliff’s. 

Josephine’s hand had slipped forward to rest against his own; she was lightly brushing his wrist now, and he did not know quite how he should respond. There was, at least, still no resumption of the Feeling, for all he was uncomfortable.

She had bent her head slightly, as if in modesty, but was looking up at him through her lashes. “What do you want, Prince Ivor?” she murmured softly. “It is ever such a puzzle, and we girls have pondered it as we more properly should have done our French grammar.” Her fingers moved against his pulse point, the skin becoming more sensitive than he could have believed. It was not the Feeling, and yet he felt strangely breathless. He wanted to turn and catch Rat’s gaze to steady himself, and yet the idea of Rat seeing him like this... 

“I have a theory,” Josephine was continuing, her voice still low, “that you are not quite sure what you want yourself. Perhaps you do not even know what you may have.”

And her other hand, in all its small pale daintiness, moved to brush against his inner thigh. 

Marco could not control himself. He stood up, pushing back his chair, and was half-way towards Rat’s seat before he could think about it. There was no clear idea in his head, no plan, only that he must be away from Josephine’s hand and that - with equal urgency - he must be closer to Rat, that with Rat some relief would be found from all that oppressed him. 

It was six or seven paces to where Rat was placed, and by the time Marco got there, Rat had also risen, was staring at him in some alarm, reaching out an arm as if to catch him, and Marco grabbed it gladly, horrified that he was behaving so in front of all the guests. It was taking all his force of will to remain standing, simply resting on Rat’s arm, rather than sinking towards him, against him, which for some reason he dearly wished for. 

“My Prince?” Rat said, urgently and Marco frowned and shook his head. 

“Marco,” he corrected, and closed his eyes as once again the heat rose in his blood, the Feeling like a wave, like something bearing him up and up into the air, high and floating and brushing all else aside. 

And then a new voice, one Marco knew too well to fully ignore. 

“Prince Ivor, your father has asked me to escort you to your rooms.” 

Lazarus was standing next to him quite calmly, his tone not angry but implacably firm. For a moment, Marco fought the Feeling, the wish to stay clinging to Rat’s side, despite the madness of it. All eyes in the room were on him, he knew, and his father must be horrified at his behaviour. 

It was this sense of guilt and shame that helped him regain control of himself, and prise his fingers from Rat’s sleeve. “Thank you Lazarus,” he said, swallowing, trying to stand up a little straighter. “I do feel rather unwell at present, I am not sure why.”

“You must rest,” Lazarus told him gently. “Follow me. Your father will visit you when he can.”

“I will help you,” Rat said at once, moving as if to go with him.

“Thank you, Sir Jeremy,” said Lazarus, “but that will not be necessary. Prince Ivor will be better resting in solitude at present.”

“Truly, Ra – Jeremy, I shall be quite well.” Marco tried to smile and feared he did not make a very convincing attempt. He wanted Rat at his side more than anything, but he knew his father’s instructions must have been explicit on this point, or else Lazarus would not insist. “I shall see you tomorrow, I dare say.”

Rat frowned and made no answer, except to nod once, sharply, in acknowledgement as Lazarus lead Marco away and out of the room. Marco heard behind them as the doors closed the sound of the musicians striking up, no doubt with the idea of protecting him from the bustle of conversation that would follow his exit. 

\- - -

Marco sat on the edge of his bed and counted his way through his breathing. He felt a little more composed now, which only meant he had far more awareness to make him worried about the scene he had just occasioned. 

“Do not concern yourself, your highness,” Lazarus told him, appearing beside him with a flannel wetted with cold water, which Marco took and ran gratefully over his face and neck. “If people do not gossip about one thing then it is about another. They will say you drank too much wine, it is a forgivable vice in young men, and that will be all they think of it.”

“But I did not, truly!” Marco was dismayed. “I did not, only the glass for the toast and that was with all of the food.”

“I know that, but other people will not.” Lazarus tilted his head to one side and gave him a look that Marco knew - the one that had in older times and a previous life appeared whenever he wished to be able to feed Marco more food or give him extra blankets and there were none to be had. “Your father will be with you as soon as he can, and I think he will be able to help you understand what is happening.”

“What is happening?” Marco echoed, confused and now a little worried. 

“Your father will explain,” Lazarus repeated. “We thought you would be older than this, but...” he sighed. “You are in Samavia, as you ought to be, and your being knows the soil of the land better than any other, save your father himself, and I suppose it is in the nature of the thing to waste no time.”

“Please, Lazarus, what do you speak of?”

For a moment, Lazarus’ features softened a little more than he usually allowed, and he patted Marco’s shoulder once, briefly. “Of nothing of which you need be ashamed. Only wait for your father, I know he will not keep you in uncertainty a moment longer than he can avoid.”

\- - -

Alone in his room – Lazarus waiting now deferentially outside the door, deflecting such servants as might normally at that hour be expecting entry to clean – Marco went to his basin and splashed his face with cold water, then stripped off his uniform coat, leaving himself in shirt sleeves. The all-pervading heat which had chased him throughout the day had still not dissipated, but this helped a little.  

Sinking onto his bed, he put his head in his hands. He could not think why he had acted as he did, why he had seemed so unable to stop himself, why no voice in his head had arrested him. Josephine’s conversation had not been very interesting but it was scarcely intolerable, and as for the pressing, breath-taking urgency that had compelled him towards Rat, he had no explanation at all.

Despite his closed door, he could still hear the distant sound of the band playing, entering into the music for dancing now, and he tried for a while simply to listen, to identify each piece and formulate in his mind the steps for it, simple mental exercises of the kind he had learnt as a boy. 

After a few waltzes and one polka, however, what serenity he had managed to gain from this undertaking suddenly shattered as they went into the unmistakable strains of the Samavian folk tune known as ‘The King’s Dance’. This folk dance, which could be seen at rural weddings as much as at palace gatherings, was a Samavian custom described in such places as Baedekker as ‘eccentric’, and required for much of the dance that the men and women split in their pairs and from then on the men dance with men, the women with other women. 

It had long been Marco’s custom to choose Rat as his partner in this dance, partly because Rat generally demurred from dancing, his mastery of mobility on his crutch not extending so far as to let him easily keep pace with a rapidly weaving floor of couples. But it was far from impossible, and it had long irritated Marco that, with Rat so pleasant a companion, more young women did not have the sense to see that with a little patience they might enjoy spending a dance with him quite as much as with some of the more ordinary gentlemen, who – it must be mentioned - would regularly move their hands to positions on the women not entirely prescribed by the dance manuals. 

True, Rat could not manage without crutches at all, and this meant alterations of other kinds in the form of holding the partner, but he and Marco had worked out a compromise that suited them. Marco had had to endure many dances with many partners over the years, and for all their easy grace, none of them were as pleasant a partner as Rat, or as pleasing to have flushed and laughing beside him. 

There were times, in this dance, in the beat of the drum and the trill of the pipes (for it was music of the hill shepherds, old and simple and primal), that Marco felt something other than himself, or at least, not himself in the way that he was used to feel. There were normally in his life so many things to remember, so many layers of training and caution. His self was usually speaking, active, analytical, controlled. Whereas in the dance, he simply was, and Rat was with him, and there seemed no before and no after and nothing that could be said or needed to be. 

And now, no doubt, Rat was alone and unpartnered and worrying for him and the rest of the assembled company gossiping and asking questions, and all because he could not control himself. 

When the knock came on his bedroom door at last, Marco had a moment’s wild imagining – half in fear, half in hope – that it was Rat himself, but then a voice called out to him and he realised the visitor to be his father. 

Marco called him at once to enter, and in he came, the man who for so many years had been Stefan Loristan and was now King Ivor, first of that name. Five years had done little to change him – it is a far shorter time for a man than for a boy – and except that where once he had been too thin he was now healthy and where once he had simply been clean and neat he was now splendid in his dress, there was little alteration in any way. They looked more alike than ever and Marco loved his father the more for it, for being as familiar as an image in the mirror. 

“Marco, my son,” said Loristan, and he looked very serious, which Marco winced to be the cause of. 

“Father!” Marco replied. “My deepest apologies, I did not... that is to say, I did not mean to...”

His father, now smiling a little, held up his hand to stem the flow and gestured to him to relax, himself taking a seat in the chair where only hours earlier Marco had been sprawled with laughter and content with the world. 

“Marco,” said his father, slowly and deeply, weighing his words. “How old do you suppose I am?”

Marco blinked. This was not the conversation he had expected, and he could not say he had ever really considered the issue. Now, with some rapid approximation and an allowance that his father was probably not as young as he appeared, he made a guess. 

“Are you perhaps forty, sir?”

The King smiled, the smile of the amused but not offended. “I am thirty-four,” he said, gently. “And indeed, I see now that you have therefore done a simple calculation and seen that I was not much older than you are now when you were born.”

“And when my mother died,” Marco said, hoping that it was not presuming too much to say so. His mother had been to him always a figure more fictional, in many ways, than the Lost Prince, but he knew, now, that people who have been in love and married were likely to miss each other when one is gone, and therefore that if his father thought of the past, then he must think of her. And Marco did not want that to be lonely for him, if he sought company for his recollections. “Did she, in fact...” Marco continued, for his father had not stopped him but was studying him, an expression of his face Marco could not understand. “Did she die of having me? You might tell me now, you know.”

His father moved back a little, sitting more upright in his chair, and looked away towards the empty fireplace, and sighed.

“What happened to you tonight was my fault, my son. By which I mean that there are things I should have told you to enable you to know what to look for and when to be on your guard.”

Marco frowned, completely at a loss. But of course nothing of it could truly be his father’s fault, of that he was certain. 

“No, I am speaking correctly,” his father insisted, in the face of his protests. “I had not supposed that this would happen to you so soon. To me you are young, you are my child. Perhaps I did not want to think you would have to undergo the same trials that beset me. But that was folly.”

“Father, I am afraid I do not at all understand your meaning.”

Loristan stood up and went to pace on the rug, his hands behind his back. 

“Marco, we have spoken often in the past, have we not, of language and its purpose? Of how a word may be a sign of a thing if it is understood to be?”

Marco, who knew about signs if any boy did, nodded. 

“When I tell you that Annette, who was my wife, was your mother, you take that as a sign of certain things. That word means to you things from common usage that it may not, in fact, truthfully imply.”

Marco had studied the natural sciences, had read reports (more, indeed, than he might have ever imagined could exist) on the breeding of sheep, and would have said he understood the main principles of reproductive biology. But his knowledge left him now yet more confused, for his father seemed to be suggesting something that Marco could not believe. 

But anything his father had done would be noble and worthy of him, of that much Marco was certain. 

“Are you saying, sir, that your wife was not my mother? That it was another woman?”

The King glanced up at him with a moment of such reflexive horror and sadness that Marco flinched. “Forgive me, father. I am sorry, I should never have thought...”

“You do not need to apologise. What other conclusion could you draw? Marco, you must understand that there are things which are true of Kings but which are not true of other people. Or at least, are true of Kings of our family, of our ancient line. In the normal way of things if a man and woman marry, and are together, a child will be born of the woman. Indeed, this is not impossible for us. But with me, as it was with my father, circumstances were different.” His father drew a deep breath. “You see, my wife – who, if I am your parent and a man and therefore called most commonly your father, will by contrast, by dint of her gender, be called your mother – was not, in point of fact, the vessel from whom you were born.”

Marco rose to stand, level with his father’s gaze. In some part of himself he understood before he had found the concept with his mind, before even his father spoke again; the knowledge was written into his being, felt deeply and instinctually within him.

His father came closer to him. He had placed his hand upon his own stomach, and Marco knew before he spoke, what he would say, and knew somehow that, as with the other secrets of their lives, it could never have been another way.

“Father,” he said, softly, and stumbled forwards, and found himself crying and his father holding him close and stroking his hair. 

“It was called, often, the _Parthen_ , in old Samavia,” his father said, after a little while of simple quiet. “Meaning parthenogenesis, which is to say the reproduction of an individual without the involvement of another individual – you are my son, generated of me, but in truth you are myself, just as I am like my own father, and all of us, back to the first Prince Ivor. We do not look alike through mere happenstance.”

Even with all the feeling experienced in the past hours, Marco felt a new and wonderful thrill at this thought. No one could have given him any greater promise than that he would grow to be ever more like Stefan Loristan.

“And yet, it is not a process we control ourselves.” Loristan had moved away now, and was standing at the mantelpiece, leaning his arm on it. “I could not have had you until I met your mother. She was the catalyst, if one may explain it in such terms. For each of us, there is such a person, one suited – perhaps by fate or gods, as the old stories would have it, or perhaps by some biochemical affinity a modern scientist would no doubt point to – but in any case suited peculiarly to us. To _each_ of us – in this much we all differ. They bring to us the _Fervour_ , the times of receptiveness, during which a child may be potentiated. But more than that – and reproduction is not the measure of our connection, any more than it is for any other couple - there is a bond in this affinity which may develop in all manner of ways, sometimes even to awareness of the thoughts of the other, or the ability to share their feelings.”

Loristan stepped forward again, and took a deep breath before speaking. 

“Marco, it is clear to see that this has happened to you and a bond has formed. And that is has been with Jeremy Ratcliffe.”

Much of the day would later seem to Marco to have happened in a blur of feeling, singular instances hard to pick out. But he would always know that at this moment, when so much surprise and quite natural embarrassment might have been forefront in his mind, what first he felt was joy. 

Very quickly, of course, consciousness reasserted itself. 

“Father,” he said, low. “If this is not what you intended for me, not in line with my duty to Samavia, then I apologise.”

“But you regret nothing for yourself? No, indeed, I see it is so, and how could it be otherwise? The only thing over which I should wonder is that I did not perceive it from the first. But you seemed so young.” He sighed, and then smiled, reaching out once again to smooth Marco’s hair. “I would never have had you make an alliance for yourself with which you were not happy. No doubt, had you made this bond with the heir to the throne of some great and rich kingdom, I would have counted it a convenience, but I yet I cannot imagine anyone I would rather entrust with you than Ratcliffe, whose loyalty I know beyond doubt.”

A horrible thought had occurred to Marco over the course of the speech, cold terror fracturing through all the escalating gladness of moments before, and he voiced it now, almost whispering in his fear. 

“But father, Rat did not want... He did not, does not... He did not ask for this. You have said yourself in the past that I cannot simply suppose him to always want to be with me. What if he loves another, or cannot want to be with me?”

Rat, noble, loyal Rat, would make no protestation, of course, would suffer it silently for him, Marco knew. And that would make it all ten million times worse. 

Loristan smiled at his son, not unkindly for all there was a slight trace of amusement in his gaze. 

“Ratcliffe has been asking to see you for the better part of the last hour. I think we may be fairly certain that he has at the least a deep affection for you. And the bond of _Fervour_ is not often misplaced. You must tell him the truth - that is all.”

Marco bit his lip, wishing he had one tenth of his father’s conviction. “Of course! It would not be the act of a gentleman to keep him in ignorance. But oh! How am I ever to begin...”

“We all ask that of ourselves,” his father said, “at many times and in many places. It is part of what it means to grow older, to put into words that which cannot or should not – but must be – spoken of.”

He embraced Marco once more, and, having drawn away, added. “My only fixed advice to you in this matter is that you are very young, even in royal terms, to consider child-bearing. I would greatly prefer you to consider waiting until you are past your twentieth year and have had more time to experience the world as you are.”

Marco was very aware of the flush spreading over his face. “Do I have a choice in it, then? I supposed you to mean that the... the _Parthen_ , had already begun.” And he had barely even begun to let that thought sink into him.

His father shook his head emphatically. “No, this is only the _Fervour_. For a _Parthen_ to initiate, you and your beloved must be intimate, as any two people intending to reproduce might be – do you understand me, Marco? I will explain further if not.”

Within Marco, good sense and adolescent awkwardness warred briefly. But this was his father, who was indeed his mother, who had been through what Marco felt now, who understood what it was to be him better than anyone, even a beloved, might ever quite achieve. 

“I think perhaps you had better explain it all to me once more,” Marco said, sitting down and resting his elbows on his knees. “It would be better to be certain, I think. I have no wish myself just yet to parent a child, and I must confess some apprehension still over how such a thing may be possible.”

“Then let us order some sweet wine and biscuits,” his father said, smiling, “and I will answer all your questions.”

\- - -

“I was beginning to be quite undone with worry, you took so long,” Rat said, having been granted admission at last by Lazarus once Loristan had gone and Marco – who had needed a little time to compose himself – had availed himself of a deep, scented bath and changed from his stiff uniform to more natural clothing. “If it is not treason to tell me then, please, Marco, let me know what is wrong.” He had gone quite pale in his anxiety, and as he spoke his eyes were wide and imploring.

“Nothing is wrong. At least, I hope not.” Marco, sitting once more on his bed, laughed a little weakly and put a hand to his head. He had been aware of the Feeling – the _Fervour_ , he supposed – rising once more in his blood as soon as Rat had come through the door. 

Marco looked down at his hands. He looked down at his own belly. He was feeling at once two very different things; the intensity of his love for his father and the joy of the yet greater degree of their closeness, and at the same time deep, sharp fear, stemming from another love, so newly known and so vulnerable to loss of all hope. 

“Tell me what frightens you so,” said Rat, at length. And, reaching out, he placed his hand over Marco’s. 

Marco, for a moment, could not breathe. 

“Oh Jem,” he said, and gasped, shaking – the choice of name was conscious, a new word for a new time between them, an evolution he could not now escape or undo – and said, as briefly and straightforwardly as he could, all his father had so recently explained of the idiosyncracies of the Fedorovitches. He felt it best to begin with this, rather than with how Rat himself had been mixed up in it, in order to see how his friend took the first before broaching the second.

“So you see, that is the way things shall be, for me,” he concluded. 

Rat was silent. He seemed to be frowning, thinking hard, and Marco felt the fear again, a whole shattering wave of it. 

“For the good of Samavia, it must be so,” Rat said at last, his head hanging. “Indeed, that must be the purpose of the meetings I interrupted last week. I heard them discussing certain nobles and foreign royals, and whether or not they were ‘eligible’. I couldn’t determine what they were meant to be eligible _for_. Now I know they meant, for you. As if anyone could...” and he stopped again. 

_He wonders how anyone could want someone as odd as me_ , Marco thought, and despaired. 

“It alarms you, then.” Marco licked his lips and closed his eyes briefly, struggling to find calm and proper words when his head hummed with such a wish merely to crawl into Rat’s arms, to seek and to nuzzle, to yearn and give and take, and other things he was not even sure he knew verbs for. “We do not have to speak of it again. Please, do not recoil from me, I will not... Rat, it is only...”

He bit his lip again. He must speak of it, of all of it. Honour demanded in this case only perfect honesty. 

“Recoil?” Rat repeated, meanwhile, in hushed tones. “Marco! My own liege! Never!” His grip on Marco’s hand grew tight, insistent, and Marco could not help but cry out as the reflexive heat moved through him, causing Rat to pull away with some alarm, which was the last thing Marco wanted. As long as some part of him was in contact with Rat’s skin, he realised now, he felt by some degrees less anxious, even if the urgency in its place threatened to overturn him. 

“It is not for any committee to chose for me, for good or ill,” Marco said now. He tried to find his father’s words, the elegant framing of what might so easily be called most base and bestial, or even bizarre, freakish and unthinkable. “The other who is required is... particular. There is one, and only one, who can act upon us in this way. One perfect consort that we must find, and, once found, must cleave to.”

“If it is what you need,” Rat said, and his voice only a little hoarse, “then I will help you to find him or her, with all my heart.”

“But, oh,” Marco sat forward and wondered if he might weep. “I have already found him. I have already... my body...” He took a deep breath. “It is a burden to lay upon your shoulders, I know, but Rat, oh Rat, it is you.”

For a time – seconds, hours, perhaps the very turning of the universe – Rat looked at him. 

Marco steeled himself: “And the truth – you must know all of it – is that although this came upon me unexpectedly, I know, in my reflections and in my heart I know, I would not choose any other.”

Rat was blinking at him, sparkling wetness in his eyes. “But Marco, I am... you know what I am.”

“That I do,” Marco whispered – Rat had not cried out, not turned away, not feared, there was yet hope - and he reached to join their hands again. Marco let his mind wander through his own feelings, through the thick and mighty weight of love that he himself was only newly uncovering. The power of it - like sunshine,  the pull of it - like fresh water, and the sweetness of it, deep, a hint of worlds still to be discovered. 

And felt, quite easily and quite wonderfully, Rat’s answer come back to him. Devotion, shaded a little differently, experienced from another perspective, but equal in all that might be considered to matter. 

Their thoughts and feelings melded, or blurred, or eased together, and for a while there was nothing else in existence. 

Then, suddenly, Rat did pull away, gazing at his hand. “You said, Marco, about this process, about... reproduction..?”

Marco laughed. It was easy to laugh, now, when everything was perfect. “We would need more than brushing hands for that. Do not worry, I know now, we must only refrain, just for the next few days...” He blushed, and looked away for a moment. “I have had it all explained, I know what can and cannot be undertaken.”

Until this point, Marco had felt only anxious caution in the contemplation of such details. Now, with Rat beside him, his scent and his warmth, the recent intermingling of their feelings still echoing in his mind, he felt his mouth become dry and a wish formulate he had not known before. 

“I confess, now I have thought of it,” Marco said, slowly “That I believe I wish to touch you, even in the manner that I know, just now, we may not. But also that perhaps I have learnt enough new things for one day.”

“May I, just then..?” Rat asked, reaching out. “Oh Marco, if you knew...”

Nodding slightly, Marco placed his own hand forwards. Rat took it and carried it gently to his lips, kissing over each of Marco’s fingers reverently. Marco whimpered, and Rat made a choking noise and bit down, only a very little, as if stumbling, and Marco found himself trembling. 

Pulling Rat with him, Marco went to lay upon his bed, on his side so that they faced each other. And, without needing to speak, together they reached out, and touched and caressed and petted, and did all that hands may do in the service of mutual delight, and found it more than satisfactory to their purposes.

\- - -

The truth of the matter was that, although after a few days Marco’s temperature cooled and he began to be able to stand to wear wool again, and his father assured him that the _Fervour_ for that year had passed, and the risk of progeny with it, he found that much of the Feeling he had for Rat was entirely the same anyway. 

And when, in the due course of things, after many days and months of slow, happy, attentive progression, he and Rat undertook such activities as might most classically be described as ‘intimacy’, he could not imagine that anything could make him want or enjoy more fervently what they shared. 

So perhaps, in the end, one might conclude that in many ways it was in fact for them a day like any other, and allow literary convention that indulgence, and, having granted that, perhaps extend also that most ancient conclusion, no less true for being familiar, that they lived happily ever after. 

\- - -

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Five Times Marco Reproduced in a Special Loristan Way, and One Time He Did It the Standard Way](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126244) by [Island_of_Reil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil)




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